percentage of the value that would take the inset all the way to a single point or line

Advantage of the first is that you can get the same absolute border size easily on different parts of the model (and scene). Advantage of the second is that you don’t have to worry about sensitivity of the slider depending on the scale of what you are trying to inset, and sometimes you may want the effect of ‘inset is exactly 25% of the way into the center’.

this is my number 1 tool that I feel has been missing for modeling. Thanks for the addon!

but, it does give some very strange results. If you see my attached image, the right one is made with your inset and left one is how I expect an inset to work. The left one is made with chromoly’s outdated “Vertex-align/ Shift faces outline”.

And then perhaps then being able to extrude out like this (i’ve angled the camera to look down on it to hopefully make the nature of the type of uniformity of the extrusion clear - well i hope so anyway! :evilgrin:)…

All the angles in this example are 90 degrees.

Anyway, hopefully this isn’t muddying the waters too much, perhaps this is for a different future tool?

Thanks again for the great addition, plus it’s great to see this tool getting exposure on the various blender sites! :evilgrin:

I will try to make my addon behave more like you want, as I can see the value of that.

The reason why it is harder than it might seem is that when the inset gets too big, the inner topology changes so it may no longer be possible to maintain the connections the way they were before inside the inset polygon(s).

To handle the general case, right now I am just tossing whatever faces were inside the inset polygon(s) and re-quadrangulating them from scratch.

I need to figure out how I can preserve what is currently inside the inset polygon if it still make for a valid (non-edge-crossing) set of faces. One probably easy first step would be to at least do this when the insetting stops before the first collision event of the type I talked about above.

@aidyfuzz - thanks for your picture. It does look interesting to do what you’re asking for but right now I have other things with higher priority to fix first, like the above and also preserving face properties like smoothing, materials, UVs, etc.

Fair enough, it’s a good addition to the toolset as is so thanks again. The inset tool that can be seen in 3dsmax or silo can already do the functionality that i was talking about, (not limited to flat surfaces that is). I used to use 3dsmax all the time but the office where i work use maya, which doesn’t have that kind of functionality, it’s a much missed feature!). Hopefully one day blender can plug that gap! Down the line maybe you’ll be the one to plug it!

A tiny update in preparation for uploading it to contrib. As well as adding links to the wiki and tracker, I made the sliders max out at 1 instead of 10, to give you more control when using this on normal-sized features. You can still get bigger amounts by just typing a number. I also made the default inset value .05 instead of 0, so that when you click the button it is obvious that the inset function is doing/ready to do something.